It was bound to happen. As surely as the bluebottle takes wing from the maggot, Labour makes another move into the personal sphere. Not content with founding the most sophisticated surveillance society in the history of the world, ministers propose new laws about the purchase of sex by men from women. Not sex purchased by men from men, mind you, or women from men (it happens, Harriet) or women from women.

There has been a collective susurration of mid-Victorian bustles as Harriet, Vera, Patricia and Fiona prepare to go into battle with yet another criminal justice bill that may transfer criminality from the woman to man in a heterosexual fornication where money is involved. We must all surely wish for the criminality to be lifted from prostitutes, but to transfer it to men is not merely the act of priggish, power-crazed, interfering feminist ideologues, it is stupid.

It will not stop the trafficking of women which this government has allowed to build to an enormous level in the last decade. And it will not stop men buying sex from women because on both sides of the divide, there are men and women who want to buy and sell sex - indeed not only want to, need to.

It is their personal choice and if both are free to make that choice, are not abused physically and emerge from the transaction satisfied or remunerated without a third party taking a cut, the state has no business, to say nothing of the practical means, to prevent it.

Our bodies used to be ours to do what we would with them. But those liberal days are gone and this development is all part of a much larger movement of intrusiveness, propelled by the evident failure of government in tackling large-scale organised crime, such as people-trafficking. Yet again, for want of any more inspired policy, an intractable problem is resolved in the eyes of the governing class by persecuting the individual and removing his or her freedoms.

But this suggestion from the government's sisterhood also demonstrates the migration of individuals' control over their lives to the state and beyond. As more power and decisions are passed to Europe - without our consent - so politicians have to find something to busy themselves with, and what better challenge than 60 million people who fornicate, drink to excess, smoke, eat too much salty and fatty food and harbour all sorts of antisocial and criminal intent?

This is a presumption of a historic scale and arrogance which is best seen in the systems set up under Tony Blair to scrutinise every movement, communication and transaction we make. But at least we now understand the extent of the takeover. According to a YouGov poll released with Liberty's report 'Overlooked: Surveillance and Personal Privacy in Britain' last week, 60 per cent of us believe we live in a surveillance state and only one in five trusts the government to keep our personal details confidential. Unless controlled, a government of long standing is by nature leaky, incompetent and greedy for ever more power.

There could be no better symbol of this essentially malign character of government than the research establishment that has caused the foot and mouth outbreak with its leaking pipes. Project that sort of inefficiency on to the ID card national data base and you have a catastrophe.

If the opposition was not of an order of intellectual feebleness that you feel must be hard to sustain, it would make the argument for the other path of government - the one that places the individual and his responsibility and choice at the heart of every proposition and gives unyielding respect to that person's privacy.

A few years ago, this sentence appeared at the beginning of a bill: 'Her Majesty by and with the advice of the House of Commons enacts as follows: rules to govern the collection, use and disclosure of personal information in a manner that recognises the right of privacy of individuals with respect to their personal information.'

The only words I have missed out are the 'senate' and 'of Canada'. Same queen, but different country and one which has placed the respect for privacy at the heart of its national life. It seems extraordinary that two countries which used to share so many political values have taken such different directions. There's a lot that Canada can teach the Mother of Parliaments, especially the opposition, which has lost the habit of thinking outside the terms that Labour has set for the national agenda.

There are two important acts which serve as good templates for the sorts of reforms Liberty calls for. The first is the Privacy Act which took effect in 1983 and which imposes obligations on some 150 government and federal departments and agencies to respect the privacy rights by limiting the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. It gives the individual a right to access and correction of personal information held by agencies. The second act is the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Pipeda), a law which means a company like Tesco, which accumulates enormous amounts of personal data, must have consent from its customers. Underlying these is the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms which states: 'Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure', a guarantee which I would like to see in a British bill of rights.

It is argued that we have the Data Protection Act and the information commissioner, but despite the latter's agitation, nothing has stopped the 500,000 interceptions of private communication each year, the total surveillance of motorways, the building of the ID card data base, the creepy children's database and expansion of the police DNA database.

The Canadian system hasn't worked perfectly, especially since 9/11, but Canadians shudder at what is happening in the UK, at the abandon with which we allow government more and more control over our lives and our futures.

A revolution of thought needs to take place. The personal information of innocent people, their digital footprints, their movements, as well as the things consenting adults get up to must not be allowed to become the property of the state or the subject of regulation by a lot of po-faced, reformed dope-smokers who can think of little but the improvement of their fellow human beings.